Feeding the starter, lazy yeast?
I keep a small amount of starter in the fridge and bake two or three times a week. Most of the times I use all of it and expand as nessesary, instead of just taking a small part and feeding the rest. I allways do at least one expasion at room temperature before using it; for example, if I'm going to bake one 800 gram loaf, I know I need 160 grams of starter (20%), so I take 80 grams and double it with equal weight flour and water, or take 53 grams and triple it. If the starter is ripe, even if it has been in the fridge a few days, it usually takes 4 hours to get ripe again when I double it and 6 hours when I triple it. I can also expand it x4 and it takes around 8 hours, or x5 and it takes around 10 hours.
So it's very a lineal operation to know how much time I need to make a certain amount of starter. Though I don't usually expand it more than x3 and try to make more intermediate expansions, unless I need a lot of it and can't fit the intermediate expansions into my schedule. I read somewhere that if you do that, the yeast and bacteria can become lazy due to the excess of food available, but I don't think that has been the case for me.
Do you know anything about this, is it true or should I stop worrying?
And another side question that came to my mind when proofreading my own text: when you talk about using 20% starter for a bread recipe, is it 20% of the total dough, or 20% of the flour weight, as in baker's percentage? Am I using too much?
Pablo
When a recipe calls for 20% (or any percent) sourdough it's 20% of the flour. The flour always = 100%
So as an example recipe...
Flour 100%
Water 66%
Sourdough starter 20%
Salt 2%
It will be....
Flour 400g (for example)
Water 264g (66% of 400g)
Starter 80g (20% of 400g)
Salt 8g (2% of 400g)
yes 20% of 800g = 160g but I think you've made an error. It's not 20% of the final weight of the loaf. It's 20% of the flour used. (just reiterating as i'm reading through your post)
Can you give us the recipe exactly how it's written?
I found this calculator to be handy, precisely because it gives you several ways to describe how much starter you are using.
Starter % of total dough
Starter as Baker's %
Starter Flour as baker's %
He describes each choice as follows:
I wound up using the calculator "in reverse" when I added too much flour to a formula, had to add additional water to get to proper hydration and needed to figure out how much more starter I was supposed to add to the final dough. I did this first by inputting the formula as shown in the book: total dough weight, total amount of starter, % salt, hydration of dough and hydration of starter.
Once I made sure that the calculated numbers all made sense based on the recipe I was supposed to follow, I then changed the dough weight to account for the added flour and water,did the calculation and saw how much starter I needed to add and saved my dough. :)
Cool little calculator. I like to start with my total batch weight, but this is good to have for something last minute. Will book mark it.
Hi. Yeah, for some reason I had allways been confused about that, thanks!
My basic recipe would be something like this:
Total flour: 470g
Total water: 330g (70% hidration)
Salt: 8g (2% of total dough)
Starter: 160g (80g flour, 80g water, 20% of total dough)
Another thing, in that basic recipe you wrote, you are counting the flour and water included in the starter as part of the 400g flour and 264g water, right?
My main question was the other one, though. Does the starter become lazy if you feed it too much?
Your recipe:
Flour 100%
Hydration 70%
Salt 2%
Starter 20%
You wish to use 470g of flour. Now let's calculate...
Flour = 470g
Water = 329g
Salt = 9g (actually 9.4g but 9g is a nice whole number)
Starter = 94g
Now you have a question about the starter. You are correct! assuming your starter is 100% hydration your final dough won't be exactly 70% hydration. You can do a couple of things here.
1. Ignore it. The difference will be very minor. We are talking about very small quantities here. If you use 94g of 100% hydration starter then you'll be adding 47g flour + 47g water. So your final dough will be...
470 + 47 = 517g flour
329 = 47 = 376g water
= 72.7% hydration
You can safely ignore this. Or alternatively you can do this....
2. When feeding your starter to put into your recipe, take some out of your 100% hydration starter and build that into a 70% hydration starter. For example...
Take off 10g off your 100% hydration starter and feed that 51g flour + 34g water = 95g of starter @ 70% hydration. And use this in your recipe. But again, it is so minor won't make much difference. And finally...
3. Add the 100% hydration starter and adjust the amount of water you put into the recipe to bring it back to 70%. So 470g flour + 47g flour (from the starter) = 517g flour.
70% of 517 = 362g water.
362g water - 47g (from the starter) = 315
So simply add 315g water instead of 329g and add 94g of 100% hydration starter.
But I don't think all this is necessary. You won't notice much difference if any!
I don't think your starter will become lazy. Starters like to be fed. But I think you shouldn't feed any less than 1:1:1
So you said you take off 80g to build 160. But how are you doing that? The only way is to feed it 40g flour + 40g water. But that is less than 1:1:1. It is 2:1:1.
1:1:1 would be 80g starter + 80g flour + 80g water.
As a rule the amount of flour you feed your starter should be equal or mare than the weight of the starter and the same weight for water.
I guess that also makes autolysing a lot easier, becuase the way I was doing it, I didn't have enough water to autolyse the flour before adding the starter.
So far it has worked for me the way I was doing it, but I´m trying to reformulate my recipes to see if I can make the whole process more efficient.
Thanks, I'll try those sugestions you gave me.
Night before: Feed Starter and Autolyse
Day of (12 hours later) - Method...
1. Mix your 93g of now active starter into the autolyse
2. Add the remaining 161g of flour
3. Form shaggy dough and then cover the bowl and allow it to rest for 30min
4. After 30min add the 9g of salt and pour the remaining 20g of water on top so that salt is wet
5. Squeeze dough till salt is fully incorporated
6. Proceed onto your stretch and folds
7. After last stretch and fold leave to rest for one hour
8. Shape dough into floured banneton (rice flour works well) and leave to rise till almost doubled
9. Score and Bake in preheated oven adding steam (an oven proof tray with water on the bottom of the oven works wel)
Any questions don't hesitate to ask.
Autolyse...
One thing I noticed is that there seems to be some confusion about the baker's percentage and how to adapt that for a pre-ferment (sourdough starter in this case, but the same holds true for any pre-ferment including poolish, biga, etc). I find it easiest to figure out what the formula would be without the pre-ferment first, and then adjust for the pre-ferment. That way you start with the final dough weight and go from there. This is also very helpful in trying to convert a formula from one with yeast to a 100% sourdough formula.
Here is a neat little trick to figure out how much flour you need for a final dough weight:
1. add all the percentages together with flour being 100%
Example: Flour=100%, Water=70%, Salt=2% ... total % sum= 172% (or 1.72)
2. Divide the total dough weight desired by the % sum to get the amount of total flour needed
Example: Desired dough weight=809g.... 809/1.72 = 470g of flour
3. Figure out the rest of the formula
Example:
Flour @ 100% = 470g
Water @ 70% = 329g (round to 330 if desired)
Salt @ 2% = 9.4g (round up or down to your liking)
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Now let's look at this with a starter. If you use a 100% hydration starter this can be faster.
4. Figure out how much starter you want to use and calculate the amount of flour in the starter
Example: If you want 17% of the flour to come from the starter, then take the total flour and multiply by 0.17
470 x 0.17 = 80g
5. Calculate how much water
Example: If your starter is 100% hydration then the water in the starter will also be 80g (100% of 80 is 80).
Example 2: If your starter is 125% hydration then the water in the starter is 1.25 x 80 = 100g
6. Add up the starter flour and water to come up with the total amount of starter in the formula so you know how much to make the night before (don't forget to make extra to keep the starter going!!!).
Example: 80+80=160g starter (make extra)
Example 2: 80 + 100 = 180g starter (make extra)
7. Final step is to subtract the flour and water in the starter from the straight formula above (let's assume 100% hydration starter):
Example Final Formula:
Flour: 390g of flour (=470 - 80)
Water: 250g of water (=330 - 80)
Salt: 9g of salt (doesn't change since there is no salt in the starer... same goes for any other ingredients used)
Starter: 160g (100% hydration... make extra)
Total dough weight: 809g
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The above seems long, but it goes really fast (I even made an Excel spreadsheet to make it easy for me to play with percentages). If you are using 100% hydration starter then you could just think of this as using 34% starter (of the final flour weight, but not of the final dough weight) and splitting it in half for the flour and water. I personally only think of the flour in the starter because sometimes the hydration of someone's starter is not 100% and this makes the conversion much easier. Plus it really is the percentage of flour that makes a difference from one loaf to the other.
If you have any questions about this I would be happy to answer them.
Shouldn't there be a separate calculation there?
In the 100% hydration example you give, for instance, you say 80g each of flour and water to make up 160g starter. If you are adding 80g of each to an existing 30g seed, then you end up with 190g starter. If OTOH your entire starter is 160g, then you'd need to subtract the equivalent of the flour and water components of the seed to get the amounts needed to build to that total, i.e 65g of each. Of course this doesn't take into account the part that cancels itself out, i.e. the portion of starter that goes back into the starter jar. But it's still important to know which way it's being calculated, no?
I think this will be very useful for me. I do some similar operations when calculating my recipes, but clearly you have put a lot of thought to it. Thanks.